First Contact: Hawaiians and the Written Word

With your kind permission, we'd like to try something a little different with today's installment of our occasional First Contact series: an account of a civilization's initial experience with written language, rather than its introduction to an alien people.

We initially planned on posting something about the development of the Hawaiian alphabet—we've long been fascinated by exactly how missionaries of the 1820s arrived at their elegant (and occasionally controversial) twelve-character...